A Place for the Mind

Tom Hare, Princeton University

NOTE NEW DATE (Rescheduled from January 19 to February 16)

Lectures on Japanese Religion

Monastic poets and painters associated with the great Zen complex at Nanzenji in Kyoto created a remarkable artistic genre called shigajiku. The objects themselves, hanging scrolls with ink paintings in the lower section, have been treated primarily as art objects by modern scholars, but when they were created in the fifteenth century, the poems written
above those paintings were more important. How do the visual and literary aspects of these objects interact, and what can they tell us about Buddhism in fifteenth century Japan?